vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) is a collection of APIs that allow storage vendors to advertise storage capabilities from the array to vCenter. The primary purpose of this is to provide useful information to the vCenter Administrator about the capabilities of the underlying storage. VASA providers can tell the administrator what RAID level is in use, disk type, replication, thin provisioning, and de-duplication. The VASA Provider data can be leveraged by the Storage Profiles feature, which allows the classification of the storage into different types and tiers. Storage Profiles can leverage this VASA information, but can also use user defined categories.
The process of importing the VSM virtual appliance into vCenter requests the majority of the configuration information; however, the VASA Provider cannot be configured as part of the import process.
This article has been donated to the VMUG Wiki – Click here to read on…